13 
This stunningly trippy object is W49B, a supernova remnant 26,000 light years away from Earth. It’s just a thousand yeas old, which in cosmological terms is not even a heartbeat in the life of a human. It may also be the birth place of a newborn black hole, the youngest ever detected in the galaxy.
Scientists created the image using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue and green), radio data from the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (pink), and infrared data from Caltech’s Palomar Observatory (yellow). And they are a bit puzzled about it, trying to know how this thing formed. According to their study, its barrel shape in “X-rays and several other wavelengths point to an unusual demise for this star.”
The supernova is highly distorted, with material “near the poles of the doomed rotating star ejected at a much higher speed than material emanating from its equator.” Usually, supernova explosions are symmetrical, like this one below, called SN1006:
Obviously, W49B is nothing like this. So what is deforming the supernova remnant in this strange way? Usually, stars that go supernova turn into heavily dense neutron stars. But this time, after closely examining it, scientists found no evidence of such a star. And that’s why they believe we are looking at the moment a black hole forms. [NASA Marshall Space Center via NASA]
Seeing pictures like that always helps to put things in perspective. Awesome does not even do it justice.
I knew Diaz will put this pic up! Honest
Forgive my ignorance but I’m confused the article says W49B is only a 1,000 years old but then says its 26,000 light years away. So doesn’t that mean that its at least 26,000 years old, i.e. the time it would take for the light to travel the distance to Earth?
Light years are a mesaurment of distance not time
I’m afraid that I don’t see how that answers my question. I realize that light years are a measurement of the distance that light travels in a Julian year or ~10 Trillion KMs. However, it is also true that an object 26,000 light years(or 26,000 x ~ 10 Trillion KMs) from you means that the light traveling from that object to you would take 26,000 years to reach you from the moment it left that object, no? If so, then the light that I would be seeing now from Earth emitted from an object 26,000 light years away from me would be light emitted from that object 26,000 years ago. If my understanding is incorrect I would be happy for you to explain in more detail why. If my understanding is correct than again I ask how can we be detecting an event that occurred 1000 years ago which is 26,000 light years away from us. Would the light from that event not need 25,000 more years to travel the distance between us?
Yeah, I read that and thought “erm, what?”
Does he mean that its 27,000 years old, so the light we are seeing is from when the object was 1,000?
the crab nebula is the remnant of (to my knowledge) the only human recorded super nova, that was over a thousand years ago. This is most certainly not it.
When did it blow? when did the explosion light hit us?
Yes that’d be the age from which we can see it, but it’d be +26k years older and look different over there now.